Not much happened yesterday. The Dow fell 47 points. The newspapers attributed the reversal to surprisingly low consumer confidence numbers. Apparently, consumers aren’t so sure this crisis is over. As we reported yesterday, they’re saving money… maybe even at an 8% rate.

Oil didn’t move yesterday. Neither did gold.

The Wall Street Journal reported that markets were reacting to “mixed data”.

That is to say, some reports were encouraging. Others were not. It was as if one weather forecaster called for a blizzard. The other for sunny skies and warm temperatures. Investors didn’t know how to dress.

Among the dark clouds was an item on the falloff in tax revenues. States are having a hard time balancing their books, because their tax receipts are declining. The WSJ reports that they are running 17% below last year.

Since states cannot print money, they’re forced to make cutbacks – typically reducing hours worked per employee as

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Let’s get this straight.

Household credit is shrinking… Profits are shrinking… Employment is shrinking… Housing values are shrinking… The wage base is shrinking…

But the recession is over!

Whoa… how is that possible?

This weekend’s news brought no surprises. For example, the housing picture is still depressing – unless you’re a buyer.

There’s “no bottom in sight” to Florida condo prices, says Barron’s. And Reuters warns that option ARM mortgages “are about to explode.” At least, that’s what the attorney general of the sovereign state of Iowa says. The option gives the homeowner the right to pay only the interest (or in some cases less than the interest) for the first few years. They’re sometimes called I.O. mortgages (interest only). And now these mortgages, written at the height of the bubble, are beginning to reset to more normal terms. According to Reuters 128,000 people in Arizona alone will face reset I.O. mortgages next year.

How

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Better late than never, Princeton University Fellow Alexander Etkind writes about Vladimir Putin's Gazeta Wyborcza article on RCW:That article reflects the deep, unresolved problems of Putin's era: the inability to distinguish between the Soviet past and the Russian present; an unscrupulous mix of political conservatism and historical revisionism; and indifference, bordering on incomprehension, with regard to the key values of democracy. (...)

Moreover, while the Munich Agreement cynically blessed Hitler's dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, it was a public document that meant what it said. But the truly important part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was its Secret Protocols, which divided Europe into two imperial domains, Stalin's and Hitler's, without the consent -- or even the knowledge -- of the nations consigned to them. Molotov, who remained in power throughout the war and until 1956, denied the existence of the Secret Protocols until his death 30 years later. Democracies make shameful mistakes, but

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Some more history rousing on the Gdansk visit by Vladimir Putin in this week's Economist:

At this week's commemorative ceremonies in Gdansk, Mr Putin offered his Polish hosts some comfort (see article). Unlike Russian official media in recent weeks, he did not blame Poland for starting the war, or try to claim that the Soviet Union's invasion of Poland on September 17th 1939 was justified. Unlike several Russian commentators, he did not maintain that the Nazis rather than the Soviets had perpetrated the Katyn massacre of 20,000 Polish officers and intellectuals in 1940. And unlike official Russian history books, which talk mostly of the "Great Patriotic War" that started only when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, he accepted September 1939 as the beginning of the conflict.

Just as the Russians suffered most from communism, so the worst damage from

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Angela Merkel is about as gracious as they come.  During the Danzig Summit, there seemed no crime of WWII that she was unwilling to accept responsibility for:  "I pay tribute to the 60m people who lost their lives in this war unleashed by Germany."Merkel's encompassing and compassionate speech was important and underrated, perhaps even taken for granted given the tidy (and deserved) historical dustbin that the Third Reich has been consigned to.  Vladimir Putin, though his comments to Gazeta Wyborcza were commendably open, did not see any reason to go quite so far to denounce the conduct of Joseph Stalin, as he doesn't believe that the Russian leader should occupy that same category as Hitler in our collective ...

From the looks of it, neither Vladimir Putin nor Donald Tusk want the Poland-Russia summit in Gdansk tomorrow on the WWII anniversary to turn into a slugfest ... but seemingly everybody else does.  From Reuters:Polish media reacted angrily on Monday to claims made on an official Russian website at the weekend that Poland's foreign minister in 1939, Jozef Beck, was a Nazi German agent.A Russian military academic also recently outraged Poles by suggesting Poland was to blame for the outbreak of war in 1939 because it had refused Germany's 'modest' demands, which included annexing the free city of Gdansk (Danzig in German). Russia responded with fury when an arm of the ...

TODAY: NATO head upbeat on relations with Russia; Medvedev looks to imams for help with Caucasus Islamic insurgents; suggests a TV channel.  Russia on the defensive regarding WW2; 70th anniversary of its start to prove a diplomatic minefield?  St Petersburg heritage status in jeopardy with Gazprom tower looming.The New York Times reports on how the period of relative tranquility in Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan has ended with a surge in violence.  Reuters relays Russian claims that an al-Qaeda agent has been killed in Dagestan.  The republic's recovering President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov has warned Medvedev that Islamic insurgency has 'permeated all facets of life in society'.   The Russian president has urged Muslim clerics to help ...

This is from a pretty interesting piece by James Marson in the Guardian:

There are three ways that people justify Stalin. First, he was a "successful dictator" in the second world war and the industrialisation drive; second, his record wasn't as bad as Hitler's; third, his ideology was more palatable.

The "successful dictator" argument is more or less the line that the Kremlin follows, with its glorification of the victory in the second world war and glossing over of everything else. But it is ahistorical to separate the bad from the good - they are both part of one whole.

The numbers game ignores the often-quoted words of Comrade Stalin himself: "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." Their ideologies may have differed, but Hitler and Stalin shared one thing in common - both were willing to sacrifice

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When I'm abroad, I often get asked who of the leaders of the Russian opposition I think stands out in some way. Usually I name Boris Nemtsov, Garry Kasparov, and Vladimir Ryzhkov. In doing so I always reiterate that I am not a political scientist, not a specialist, not an expert, and god knows not some kind of maven on the subject of Russian political reality... My opinion, it is absolutely subjective, as such I'll explain some of my perspectives before getting into this interview, so the reader knows what they are getting.

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Personal impressions play a role: I am acquainted with Vladimir

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Do you remember the first time you saw a rain drenched Peter Finch scream, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”? We do. We were too young to see Network in the cinema (the movie came out the year we were born: 1976). Instead, we watched it late one night on TV. And we’ll never forget the moment when Finch’s character, news anchor Howard Beale, arrives in the television studio in his tan raincoat with a deranged look on his face and begins to speak to camera.

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there’s nobody anywhere who seems ...